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The stretch of the leather coating the steering wheel beneath your palm is…
It isn’t dissatisfying. Curling your hand around the worn texture and hearing its protestations reflect the same tension in your knuckles and tendons and wrist and arm and shoulder – that’s somewhat satiating, on a visceral level you don’t typically tend to intentionally interact with.
It sort of gets to the itch.
Not really though, in that sense that you can scratch your own back and mostly get to where you want (unless you get a voucher to take the gymnastics course a town over and can reach your hands to meet behind your back like Tammi Dineen, although you don’t have the uh, assets, that this presents beautifully in the front like she does, lordy) but in the sense that you know you’re working with a substitute and what you’ve found will be okay enough for now.
In all honesty, there really wasn’t a plan beyond ’get the car moving and have fun from there’, which you’re vaguely regretting.
Except you’re not, actually. Regretting anything. You feel alive, and awake, and maybe even more awake than you have in a while, and you feel so much and you don’t know what to do with any of it, much less all of it, and you’re blinking back water as Ronnie grabs your arm and brings you back to the present enough to learn that there’s cops pulling you both over and an altogether different sort of overwhelming bullshit starts to creep up through your veins.
—
‘Theodore Lasso.’
It’s somewhere between a statement and a barked call to attention but it might as well have been a tornado siren for the way it shocks your adrenal system into gear. You’ve got the car, so mom must have hitched a ride with one of the deputies to come get you from the station, since dad’s gonna need his truck since he’s gotta be up super early for work and she comes home late anyway. For some reason that makes you feel even less like meeting her gaze before she bends over to sign the paperwork releasing you out of this building where the air is dusty and smells of a general staleness that you can’t specifically pin to anything in particular.
Mama is quiet on the ride back home, in the car that you had just been driving through the streets – not too quickly, and not really that dangerously, and you’re a little resentful that Ronnie goaded the cops like that because otherwise you might have been able to get away with it, what with the fun part being driving faster in the straightaways in the quieter parts of town, and –
‘My daddy loved horses.’
You’ve been studying your hands and your shoes and the dashboard and things in the side-view mirror like someone about to be graded for their life on a spatial awareness test, but this makes you glance at least as far over as your mama’s hand on the stick-shift, smoothly moving into second gear after waiting to hang a left turn at the light.
‘Always worked around ‘em. Didn’t have any of his own. I never caught the bug, myself.’
Another smooth series of shifts through a four-way-stop as you get closer to home. It’s easier to watch her hands as she confidently and instinctively handles the car. She does it much better than you just did.
You’re not sure if that makes it worse or not – it certainly doesn’t seem to be making it any better. The old Nissan your daddy was fixing for a while comes to mind long enough to recall that you definitely did not do any favors to the transmission while trying to help him with some repairs, so you may not be a car aficionado regardless of whatever it is you have in your hands.
‘What do you love, Teddy?’ she finally asks, after a handful of seconds that span the entire Reagan administration.
‘You an’ Dad an’ Sophie,’ is the immediate answer, the latter of which is the most recent lamb from the McFarlanes with the yarn shop in town. She smiles, but shakes her head a little bit.
‘You gotta have somethin’ you like that’s not people, Teddy. Somethin’ out there that you can go to when you don’t wanna talk to anybody else in the world. That’s just for you.’
You’re fifteen, but you both balk and feel indignant at the thought, and the confusing reconciliation between the two takes its sweet goddamn time to mosey on over. While this complex emotional reaction is taking place, she pulls into the drive and puts the car in park once you’re close enough to the house.
‘I like makin’ jokes?’ a statement that comes out like a question wearing a statement costume for Halloween. Mom’s laugh is tinged with something that’s not disappointment, but is still a bit of a sigh in the way the pneumatic-level pressure in her shoulders lets out and lets them dip just a bit.
‘I like makin’ jokes that make people feel better,’ stated more decisively. More of a fact. More of something you’re trying to convince her of and rally your own self-preservational walls around.
Mom still isn’t convinced.
She says, ‘That’s not a bad thing, but jokes are still with other people, son. What do you have that’s just for you?’
You blink.
You’ll blink for a long time.
She’s out of the car with a quick pat to your knee before you can think of an answer you can’t immediately also discard.
You haven’t come up with one that doesn’t feel like it has holes in it by the time you make it inside. Maybe that’s what she was getting at.
———————————
x
———————————
There’s a nice breeze coming in from the window now that you’re off the highway and the speed limit’s low enough to have them rolled down without feeling like you’re in a windtunnel.
It’s been a long day, the drive to the next state over taking several hours, especially given that you were determined to do it all in one day - for whatever reason, the idea of stopping for the night in a hotel given the circumstances just didn’t seem like a particularly good one.
(There is a reason. There’s several reasons, to be honest. But, it doesn’t really seem worth dissecting and dividing them out from one another given that the decision has already been made.)
At this point it’s somewhere between late night and early morning, depending on whether you’re the sort of person who prefers to get up with the sun or pass out in bed alongside it instead.
The air is crisp but soft in the way that it can be at this time of year, when the weather can’t quite decide whether it wants to be summer or fall or winter just yet and tends to mean that you just have to dress in multiple layers every single day for several weeks at a time. It’s Saturday now, and you’re taking roads that meander through areas that are residential and then back to shops and restaurants, and you’re encountering the smell of smoke from the occasional fireplace, exhaust from a late night delivery truck that might need a tuneup, a faint whiff of something savory and delicious floating in the air that’s gone before you can place it, then a brief patch of warmer humidity that suddenly turns into a chillier patch and instantly makes goosebumps rise on your forearms while you will away the sense you’ve just driven through some sort of ghost.
The body in the seat next to you shifts a little, a quiet little snuffling sound being emitted in the process. A quick glance to the side shows that he’s still asleep, just readjusting in the seat. These aren't the most comfortable in the world on a good day, much less when you’ve been sitting in them for several hours straight. Granted, you did get off the highway a little earlier than you needed to, just to give him a little more time to snooze, and yourself a little more time to mull things over.
(The savory smell comes back and your stomach growls. You stopped for burgers maybe two or three hours ago, but at this point you’re just itching to get back home and will make a PB&J when you get there before you fall into bed and throw an arm across your girlfriend, who’s been spending more time than not sleeping at your place since her roommates make it hard to study.)
Your thoughts are already tumble-drying over each other, so you take a moment to see if you can separate the fitted sheet from everything else before it all gets wadded up into a solid mass of cotton notions and polyester dreams.
First things, you’re probably gonna wanna get that spare bed out of mom’s garage. Can probably get it set up in the basement – it’s semi-finished and you’re glad that it’s been your weekend project for the last part of the summer leading up back into the school year. The mattress’ll probably have to air out for a couple days since it’s been raining a lot lately, but you doubt he’ll mind spending a few nights on the couch.
Second, gonna have to finish that conversation with Michelle. It was mostly done, but there were clearly some lingering concerns – entirely valid, you get it, but you had to leave before they’d been settled since the drive was going to take so long.
(She made good points, but she hadn’t gotten super familiar with Willis back in college, considering the timing of everything, and you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t had a couple reservations of your own, although the longer you spent talking to her about it, the more certain you were that the choice of action you were taking was the right one. Something about that certainty was reassuring – you liked the way it felt. Settled. Believing not only in the best of others, or at least not the worst of them, but also a solidity within yourself that you don’t always feel you possess.)
Third, figure out something for Willis to do while you’re at work. Bringing him around a few days, sure, no big deal, but it’s not like he’ll be able to suddenly just be there every day, especially not with the football season being underway already.
(Even if it wouldn’t likely ping anybody’s radar to suddenly have some new guy hanging around all the time, you won’t have the time or attention to keep an eye on him enough to make it worth doing, not with your plans of trying to make it up to the next division, much less eventually to an NCAA level. Money’s never really been something you’re accustomed to having a lot of, nor has it ever been something you’re particularly interested in accumulating beyond the necessary, but as it goes things are tight and at some point you wanna maybe have a kid and right now you’ve got your eye on an engagement ring and what’s going on in your checking account at the moment just ain’t gonna cut it.)
And maybe that’s enough thinking about that for now. Deep breath in, unclench your hand on the wheel, blow out the air and shake out the buzzing in your joints, and continue on the way home.
—
Tonight is thick and hot, the air blanketing the ground and dragging everything deeper into the earth.
You hadn’t expected to visit a correctional facility twice in one week, but here you are. Or rather, here you are-going-to, since it’s still a few blocks away.
At least this time it’s not several hours away.
This past week has been… Well. It’s hard to explain. Nothing about it has been particularly strange, but at the same time, it’s like two different eras of your life are colliding smack dab into each other. Will– Beard, he apparently has taken to going by now, quickly became one of your closest friends back in college. He knew how to make the silence comfortable, knew somehow when to press and when not to, and while you didn’t share many specifics with each other regarding the nature of your mutual traumas and issues, you both got to a point where you understood enough to hedge around and bump against one another’s boundaries without ever feeling like you were treading on eggshells in the process. Spending a lot of time exercising together and watching games from the sidelines kind of created a natural pairing between you both, and neither of you minded it all too much. Both of you needed the camaraderie of being on the team without necessarily all of the pressure that sometimes entailed, brittle and mending as you both were.
It’s been nice, having your friend around again after having grown apart over the last few years. Aside from a slight amount of initial awkwardness, you both very quickly picked up like you’d never been apart at all, falling right back into the familiar cant and cadence from before. The only indicator of any time apart were the short backtracks here and there in various anecdotes, needing to fill one another in on contextual details that were necessary to keep up with the story.
He’s been staying for nearly a full week at this point, enough time to refamiliarize yourself with each other and give him a few days to readjust to the full range of personal autonomy again, looking in the paper for potential pick-up jobs here and there, considering the options. He hadn’t wanted you to go get the bed from your mom’s house, insisting that he wasn’t going to be staying long enough to bother with it, despite how many times you insisted instead that he could stay as long as he needed to. Michelle had even come around relatively quickly, although she wasn’t staying over quite as much as she had been just yet. Tonight was one of those nights, and you’re still working on the residual guilt of calling her up to ask if you could borrow her car to drive over to the station.
The look on her face politely repeating a couple of her concerns even if she didn’t actually voice them didn’t necessarily help when you picked up the keys.
You use the red-light before you pull into the parking lot to take a deep breath since you don’t want anybody in the station to potentially notice anything amiss.
Does it really count as a lie if you would have loaned him the car anyway if he’d asked?
—
Back out in the parking lot, Beard’s posture looks like he can’t tell whether he wants to say something or crawl into a hole, and it feels like it would be too soon to offer anything in the moment, so you simply clap a palm to his shoulder, a squeeze and a gentle back and forth movement, before you head over to Michelle’s car and open the driver’s side door. Resting your forearms on the roof and the top of the door, you look over at Beard until he finally looks over at you to make eye contact.
A slight jerk of the head, a ‘C’mon, buddy,’ and you climb into the car and start the drive back home.
You see familiar headlights in the rear-view mirror a couple minutes later.
—
You left the door unlocked when you came back in, knowing that he would come inside in his own time. You’re tired, since it’s late and you’d fallen asleep at your desk earlier looking into some endorsement proposals and partnerships, and there’s a bit of an adrenaline crash going on after first waking up to the call from the police station – always kinda scary in its own right – and then convincing them all that you gave your buddy the car instead of having been surprised to hear he wasn’t even on the couch anymore.
(Guess that’s how mama felt, all those years ago.)
There’s some eggs in the pan and some more being whisked in the bowl with a fork when you hear the front door gently close.
‘I’ve only got two pieces of bread and a hamburger bun so we can either go splitsies on one of each or you can take your pick of either.’ Some shuffling noises, and you pretend to ignore that shadow hovering around the tiny table in the not-really-a-dining-room-because-it’s-half-of-the-living-room while you sprinkle a little salt over the bowl.
‘Personally I’d go for the former, since the bread gets nice and doughy but the bun is a potato one and therefore fancy, since I got ‘em leftover from a fundraiser last month. Still, you’re welcome to be a purist in either sandwhich way you wanna slice it.’
(Honestly, you’re kinda proud of that one. Not too shabby for half-past semi-delirious o’clock.)
‘Don’t think I’ve got any A1 but I think there’s some Heinz 57 leftover from a meatloaf mama made when she came over a couple weeks ago. You’ll have to make do with that or plain ol’ ketchup.’
Still silence. The eggs in the pan are gonna get burned if you keep them in there too much longer, no matter how much you keep moving ‘em around, so you quickly plate up one with a slice of bread and another with the bottom of the bun, tipping the eggs onto one of them at random. Still a choice either way like that.
‘Gonna have to make a choice in the next couple’a minutes though,’ lopping a thin piece of butter into the already hot pan and swirling it around to coat the surface. ‘These don’t take long to–’
‘Ted.’
There’s a sudden tenseness in your shoulders and elbows, one that you forcibly will away after pausing for a moment or two to decide if you feel like pushing through with the conversation or following the detour Beard’s just smacked plain-dab into the middle of the street.
You turn the eye off and move the pan over so that the butter doesn’t smoke up and set off the incredibly finicky smoke alarm you keep meaning to take a look at, then turn around, since the least you can do for this conversation you aren’t sure you want to ever have – much less right now – is to look at your buddy while he gets out whatever it is he wants to say.
It’s quiet for a while.
He doesn’t seem to know what to say, what he even wants to say.
The both of you mostly maintain eye contact, only miniscule shifts in your expressions.
You don’t know if you should say something, what you even want to hear.
Suddenly it feels like the air shifts, which may be because you’ve been staring at each other long enough and communed on the astral plane, or just because the air conditioner kicked in and it suddenly feels less stuffy and clouded in the room.
‘Right,’ you say, a small clap to emphasize the point as you start to turn back to the eggs and the stove. ‘Executive decision, one of each it is.’ Then, you turn around to point at him for a moment, ‘You get the cold one.’
It’s a ghost of a smile, but you’ll take it.
———————————
x
———————————
It’s hard to see.
This field is bumpy; it’s one that you know Mr. Brown left fallow this year, and it took a little while to get here since you technically live on the edge of the suburbs but that doesn’t matter because you’re hyperventilating and it’s a good thing that you’re still driving in straight lines at all.
You blink hard, sniffing, and there’s a high pitched sound that has to be coming from your own throat except you don’t register it at all; you can’t hear anything except for the whining in your ears and the deep sound of sorrow from your chest even though that doesn’t mean anything at all.
It doesn’t make sense.
You feel so empty, and yet at the same time that you’re absolutely fucking bursting at the seams.
What the hell are you supposed to do with all of this?
There’s a few minutes of gripping the wheel again, of trying to relax your muscles and then tensing up all over again for another reason, of tearing up and then getting angry about it and getting more and more angry as a result. This is your daddy’s truck, and your immediate anger is taken out on the steering wheel, a decent substitute for your ire since you know you’re smacking the same surface your dad used to grip every day between work, the sports bar, and home. You alternate between gulps of the warming beer you brought with you, the last few of the big case from the fridge, until you’re tired and a little dizzy and you can’t tell if the feeling in your hands is bruising, buzzing, or just being bombarded with emotion as a whole. The smell alternates between reminding you of Sunday afternoons and making you feel nauseous as hell, and it really doesn’t seem like it’s helping but you keep going anyway.
Eventually, you wrench yourself out of the truck and run haphazardly into the field. You run until you trip over a clump of earth, and let how the fall pushes the air from your lungs be a stopping point. You lie there on your back, chest heaving, and enjoy how there’s not enough breath in your lungs to keep those thoughts in your head.
All of these feelings and nowhere to go. The person you’d normally try to talk to about them isn’t available; is the reason half of them are here in the first place, and mama… She just kept going, and damn if that didn’t just make everything even worse. She was sad, obviously, cried off and on for a while, but she didn’t even take any time off of work aside from what was needed for the funeral and the wake, and now it’s almost like nothing ever happened at all. She just keeps talking to you about your ACTs and if you’re going to the next dance and what you’re going to bring to the next fundraiser for the football team, and the few times you’d tried to bring anything about all of this up her face had just smoothed out like she couldn’t deal with it at all and eventually you just stopped trying. Eventually she’d figure out how to deal with it, you thought, and then maybe you’d be able to figure out how to deal with it, and you could both deal with it together.
Except apparently that was how she was going to deal with it.
And that made it almost like going through all of it all over again, knowing that she wasn’t coming to join you, that you’d have to work through it on your own after expecting and hoping that eventually she’d meet you in the middle, that you’d be able to help each other carry it all. It felt like there was a hook in the middle of your chest pulling your ribcage deeper into yourself, like a black hole in your sternum that wielded an enormous amount of pressure while crushing you into little pieces of nothing at all.
But here, hyperventilating and looking up at the stars still visible through the light pollution, it’s finally quiet for a moment. Vaguely, some part of your brain recognizes you’re going to have to stop, that you’ll pass out if you stay this dizzy, and you’re going to get a headache from all the water leaking out of your face, and you don’t want mom to worry while you sleep here in a field under the weight of the sky and everything else trying to drag you down into the earth.
—
It’s always been you and mom and dad. You have a few cousins, an uncle you’ve only mostly known in name, and an aunt, another aunt, and an Aunt Jill who isn’t really an aunt but she really is, more than the other two, and a nana and a papaw and a grandpa, along with the extra smattering of people where you’re not quite certain of the actual relationship. Most of them live a few hours away though, or in another state at this point, and you guys have also moved a couple times since dad’s job kept changing and you had to be somewhere else.
Ephemeral family outside the tangible one, always there in theory but rarely in practice, not for any failure on their own part but just because it “didn’t work out” trying to go see them. You remember that it was your uncle or a cousin who was meant to pick you up from the clocktower, a miscommunication for whatever reason that meant you spent the better part of four hours there on your own. You’ve met your aunts (lowercase A for two of them, because it’s not part of their names given the lack of familiarity) a few times, and they’re alright but they seem to think you’re either still eight or a girl or really juvenile in general, and you wind up having to entertain yourself when you stay over. Thankfully, it’s not long.
Aunt Jill is your favorite, but she was working on something that takes a lot of time (you know now that it was a medical degree) and she has less and less time to help out while mom and dad are at work.
Mom is great. She levels things out even before they’re necessarily uneven, and she always starts bad news with a good thing first that makes you laugh a little bit.
(This actually makes it a little hard to trust good news sometimes, but that’s not her intention, and you push it aside.)
Mom likes to watch movies and tv shows, and she loves a good pop culture reference, and the two of you get on like a house on fire, and it’s good. It’s genuinely very good. You both miss your dad because he works a lot and you talk about both him and your plans for the weekend again, but then she puts a knock-knock joke in your lunchbox or an extra cookie at snack time and all is forgiven.
Dad likes to go to P&J’s every Sunday, and you like snacking on the peanuts and playing darts with everybody while you’re there. You get to sit at the bar and sip what starts off as water or pop and later on through the years becomes very watered down Whiskey Sours. They’ve also got stellar mozzarella sticks, although their wings are honestly for shit, no matter which sauce they pour on top.
You like it, the routine and the way that no matter what happens during the week, you’ve got something you can always look forward to at the end of it. Very infrequently he has to rain check, picking up an extra bit of work, or hanging out with his friends, but nine times out of ten it’s something the both of you can do every week without fail.
Sundays in general tend to be pretty busy - you’ve got church in the morning with mom, then to P&J’s with dad, then back home to finish up whatever homework you still have (usually pretty much all of it) while mom makes dinner and dad does whatever he needs to do around the house or to get ready for work tomorrow. Sometimes you work on it at the kitchen table, mom and dad popping in and out with help whenever you get stuck.
Sundays are busy until all of a sudden they’re wide open, because you can’t set foot in the bar again and you disagree so vehemently with some of what the church says about people that quit that you refuse to set foot in there either. The only thing left is helping mom in the kitchen, and she actually tends to be a bit of a miser about that sort of thing, so you have to find something to do in the kitchen during your own time.
You like the specificity of baking. Cooking is very laissez-faire, and also alright in its own way, but baking is exact. It’s exact in a way that you think math is supposed to be, except math is confusing and this shit makes sense.
—
It takes a while.
It takes a long while.
And then you gradually realize that there’s a depth that’s missing. It comes about because you’re a newly made teenager, and you need to talk about things, because you’ve all always talked about things, but this particular time it doesn’t feel like it actually gets to where you needed it to be. You feel like you slid a solid line down a lottery scratch-off, but didn’t actually finish scraping everything off, the quarter hanging in midair waiting to learn what to do.
‘What makes you both happy?’ you ask, because you’re sometimes trying to figure that out for yourself, even though there’s ostensibly nothing wrong with your life that you can point to. You still occasionally feel so heavy, so weighed down, like it’s dragging through some other form of gravity just to do the things you actually like to do. It’s that or you’re so jumpy that you can’t seem to settle, an omnipresent tingle just waiting to light down your spine at something you can’t even identify. You’d hoped to get a smattering of examples from the both of them, a bunch of things from the people who made you to try out. Instead, you get some awkward pauses, and then the sort of answers you already got out of a pamphlet or three that you’ve picked up.
’You do, Teddy.’
‘A nice burnt ends sandwich.’
‘Camping up in that spot we go to.’
‘Reading a good book on the porch when it’s raining.’
‘Getting my hands dirty with a new project.’
They’re nice thoughts, but something about the suggestions falls short, making you feel a little irrationally irritated. That in itself is a little annoying, since they’re perfectly fine answers to your question, even if they’re not quite what you were looking for.
’No, I mean. What– More like what do you do when nothing else makes you happy? Or when you just need to not have thoughts for a while?’
That seems to throw them both for a bit of a loop. They both make eye-contact for a couple moments, apparently coordinating an answer.
’Well there’s always something that’ll help, you just gotta keep looking for it. If what you used to like isn’t working, maybe you just need something new,’ says mom.
‘Did you ever think about trying out for the football team so you’ve got something when basketball season is over?’ says dad.
‘Or volunteering like you were thinking about last summer? You’ve always liked helping people,’ says mom again.
Dad has already turned to leave, and mom looks at you a half second longer and then turns towards her own direction, and you don’t know what to do because apparently asking for help overwhelmed them both since they’re leaving and you know they have their own shit to deal with and you didn’t mean to do that so maybe you’ll just figure it out on your own next time.
(After supper they’re both back to normal, and you all have a great evening telling stories and jokes and playing a dumb pretend game from when you were little, and it’s alright.)
—
The ground is cold, leeching heat out of your skin and bones through the decided lack-of-a-coat you don’t have on. It’s lumpy, and your fingers start drifting through the dirt and small weeds that are coming up here and there, losing sensation from the chill and endocrine crash washing through your body. It’s quiet enough, the sound of insects and the semi-distant highway with an occasional car breaking up the whooshing in your ears. You can still taste the beer on your teeth and tongue and lips, mouth feeling clammy between that and the dehydration settling in. It smells like the earth, in that crisp and moist sort of way that things get at this part of winter in the nighttime darkness.
It’s a while before you stand up, having let everything bleed out of you into the ground, leaving you feeling hollow and fragile, a paper boat floating down the stream trying to evade the inevitable. You pour out the last half inch left in the can and let muscle memory guide you back home.
It’s not the first time you’ve come out here, and it’s unlikely to be the last.
———————————
x
———————————
You remember being sort of a nervous little dude a lot of the time. You did a lot of watching - people, things, animals. The best way to make sure you understood what people were gonna do was to make sure that you understood them in general, and even then people could be frustratingly erratic sometimes. It wasn’t even that two different people would respond to the same thing in different ways, but sometimes the same person could respond to the same thing in different ways depending on other things that were going on.
Over time, this became general curiosity for just about everything you could get into – people, things, animals. You asked people questions, since it was the simplest way to learn about them. Your nerves made you occasionally rush into things without really thinking about them too much, because otherwise you’d wind up overthinking everything and wouldn’t do anything at all. Not necessarily rash, but sometimes you could have put a little more thought into things before you were in the middle of them, getting a gradual education both in theory and by making mistakes. You moved from a wide-eyed observer to, as your mama put it, single-handedly trying to run the local pharmacy out of band-aids, and then all of a sudden, you were a teenager.
Something about that period of your life put you enormously off-kilter for a while. Suddenly, that nervousness felt like a lack of control, which left you frustrated and confused at what felt like random and unexpected moments. The companionship from team sports helped you find a solid foundation that helped some, and you drifted into helping with student theatre productions in the off-seasons – something about telling stories and trying on other personalities, or just working backstage with an altogether different sort of team building it out even further.
College initially saw you wound about as tight as a wire over the Niagara. You started off with an undeclared major and finagled your course-load to hit as many different topics as possible while still hitting your Gen Ed requirements. (Your advisor was… Patient.) For a while it wasn’t really possible to tell what direction you were headed in just by looking at your transcript, but then you decided on Sociology. You liked that it was more sweeping than psychology without being so all-encompassing as anthropology.
After a semester of that, you switched to Physical Education with a minor in English.
(Part of this is because apparently you should have started Sociology last year if you wanted it to be easier given the sequential requirements, and part because you don’t actually like the compulsory participation in the grad student experiments. It is, however, mostly because of both Willis and your dad, as well as both your new football coach and your old tee-ball one.
’Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming,’ from your new coach. It’s technically a quote from another coach, but he’s the one who introduced it to you and therefore it’s irrepressibly connotated with him instead, and you folded it into your foundation along with everything else.
’You’re playing the field as much as the other team, Teddy; keep that in mind,’ from your tee-ball coach. That (eventually) taught you how to look a little bit more at the whole picture, as opposed to how you tended to dial into a specific detail and fixate on it. In hindsight, it was almost bizarrely above your grade in terms of… Literally being above your actual reading grade level, but also in how it reflected both how your coach was most used to coaching the junior varsity team, as well as how badly he needed to help shift your focus so you stopped staring only at the ball.
It didn’t wind up netting you a homerun since you only managed a little bit of an infield roll on that one, but it was a phrase that echoed between your ears for a very long time regardless.)
———————————
x
———————————
The sound of mom’s car is very distinctive – it always makes a specific sound when it turns to the left into the driveway, and you can hear it even through the haze of grief and stale beer and the pillow over your head.
You’ve both been putting this off for a few days now. But mostly a few hours.
Dressed in black dress socks and stripey boxer-briefs with your white dress-shirt buttoned up to your wrists and neck while your hand fists around a tie and an undershirt rapidly sticks more and more to your skin, you listen very carefully to the sounds from your mom downstairs while she goes about whatever it is you do after a funeral and before a wake.
The need to be down there with her is violently crashing against your need to cocoon yourself in protection away from the world, and you feel like a bit of a coward but it’s the latter that winds up winning out. You squiggle deeper into the mattress, the pillows, the quilt that your nana made beneath a blanket that mama made, and let yourself overheat and under-hydrate and overthink and over-emote, and over–
And over–
Thank god her car doesn’t backfire, it only sounds like an incredibly stressed porch door.
You still can’t get either sound out of your head. There’s the obvious bang still echoing around your skull, but it’s the slightly more ominous and much more quiet clatter-thud that you now know was the gun bouncing off the table and onto the floor that accompanies it.
At least you don’t remember hearing the thunk of a much larger object doing the same.
———————————
x
———————————
You more or less tumble into bed nearly as much as you collapse onto it. It’s been an incredibly full few days, what with the match with Man City, your mom, your nerves, and your history. Rolling onto your back, you let your fingers trace wrinkles in the sheet while your thoughts continue rolling into patterns in your head, washing and bumping up against one another in an attempt to settle into place.
I’m gonna leave her out of this, you’d said, about Sharon, and then in the very next moment commented on how she was going to react to everything when you inevitably wind up telling her about all of this the next time you chat. It fills you with the same sort of anticipatory tension you’ve come to associate with therapy - that frisson that so perfectly straddles the line between excitement and anxiousness. You’ll feel better once it’s all been untangled, but to get to that relief you have to first make it through the knot, and unfortunately there’s no Alexandrian shortcut for this sort of thing.
Hearing your mother admit, finally, that she effectively shut down by refusing to do just that, after all these years, feels… There’s a sense of relief, but all in all nothing’s particularly changed on a seismic level. You already knew what she confirmed, and the confirmation hasn’t done anything to abate the aftermath of that decision. It was cut, too, by her saying she wished you hadn’t held it all in for so long – that in itself a direct product of the issue being mentioned. People don’t have to unload things that they didn’t feel the need to first pack and carry to begin with.
Truthfully, it wasn’t just that pivotal moment that created that sense of needing to be okay, because it had been a sort of undercurrent up to that point anyway, but boy oh boy was that pivot a severely hard left turn in your life’s events.
Different scenes are passing by like a bored child with the clicker on a Saturday afternoon once all the cartoons have gone off. You remember the day of Paul’s funeral, Sharon mentioning that your father had taken a lot away from you, while you instantly mentioned he’d taken a lot from your mother as well, even though she wouldn’t admit it at the time. It’s still painful, that her choice forced you both to muddle through that miasma individually rather than as a team, still pulls at whichever sense of insecurity it is that you have in regards to losing people.
That sense of fear that’s convinced you somehow that getting close to your own son isn’t a safe option.
God, you fucking hate ties. Truly one of the world’s least great or innovative inventions. Zero stars, can not in good faith recommend. You like to think you’re not a particularly competitive person, but if you’re just going to settle for a tie then what was the point of even playing?
That little guy is starting to come to the point of his life where your own earliest memories and impressions of your father still linger deep within the subprocesses of your mind. What is he going to have in place if you’re not there to fill them? If he only ever sees his dad for a few weeks around significant dates and through a screen? How much more could you be than another holiday tradition at that point?
You wind up falling asleep in the company of a million questions that don’t have answers.
—
Beard can obviously tell something is up but he’s being very polite about keeping his curiosity not only to himself, but quietly so. You’re alright at the former, with the right circumstances, but your curiosity is always very noisy and obvious. It’s a particular skill of Beard’s that you’ve been gently envious of for quite some time now.
‘Coach, you ever feel like a piece’a salt water taffy that’s on one of those stretchin’ out machines that just keeps going round and round?’
‘Only after ingesting a very particular strain of mushroom.’
That pulls a huff of laughter out of you before you both settle back into the rhythmic sound of footsteps hitting pavement.
Why’s it called Paved Court anyway? Everything around it is also paved, and it’s not a court, it’s more of an alleyway. Or, as you’ve relatively recently learned, a “close”, with the S that’s an ess not the S that’s a zee. Or ‘zed’, which they call it here for some absolutely goofy-ass reason. Paved Court, Richmond Green, which you get to by crossing The Green, which is a street – all these silly names. It’s a park, of course it’s green. Although it could have been paved, apparently, which The Green is, since it’s a street. You take The Wardrobe off The Green to get to Richmond Palace, which is actually mostly gone except for a few buildings that look sort of like a castle and sort of like a house, and not like a palace at all. They’re all so straightforward except half of them aren’t true. It reminds you of how you eventually just couldn’t trust math anymore.
But that’s a tangent for later. You’re putting off the inevitable, letting your thoughts meander like this as it is.
‘Good match against Brentford today.’
Maybe Beard can tell you might need a little bit of a push.
But you also might not, as all this statement elicits out of you is a slightly distracted hum of agreement.
‘Think we can say Dani is successfully over his case of the you-know-whats.’
Another hum.
‘What’d you think of Tina Feyhound’s little helmet?’
‘Think that was Macy Greyhound, coach.’
‘And here I was starting to think you weren’t actually listening.’
At that you look over, a little guilt washing over your features for a few moments. ‘Aw hell, sorry about that. Got a few trains running around on these thought-tracks.’
‘Do I need a ticket to ride?’
‘’Fraid everything’s sold out for the day. Gotta see if I can sort through some of these itineraries. Appreciate you though.’
‘Anytime.’
—
The rest of the walk home is spent in relatively comfortable silence of the sort that you and Beard only share on occasion. It’s not often you’re content with that sort of quiet, but in this instance you find Beard’s presence without pressure to perform to be a source of strength you can pull from. He’s always been the immovable object to your unstoppable force, and it can occasionally be such a relief to let yourself stop forcing and lean against his particular brand of chaotic immutability.
That said, it also feels particularly nice to lean against the door for a moment, the weight of your thoughts overwhelming as soon as you’re in private and no longer need to continue the facade you haven’t been able to shake off since you were a pre-teen.
You abandoned me.
If there’s one thing you’ve told yourself for the better part of the last three decades, it’s that you don’t quit things, and you damn sure don’t quit on people. It’s a fear that you’ve only recently become more cognizant of, thanks to all your chats with the Doc. Sure, you knew that you didn’t like it when people left, when people disappeared without explanation, or without giving you the chance to tell them what they meant to you, but you hadn’t realized that dislike ran so deep as to verge into genuine fear. Hadn’t realized it was possible to even hide things like that from yourself.
Keys go in the dish on the little table by the door, backpack goes in the armchair with the ‘Happy Place’ pillow that sits in front of the other pillow that helps it take up so much space you can’t really even sit in the chair anyway, puffer gets slung on top of that, and you rest both palms on the back of the chair and lean forward and drop your head and sag your spine between your shoulder blades as you exhale the day out of your lungs.
Like you switched out a light, just like that.
It nags at you, that you didn’t see it (again.) That you thought you’d done your bit, that everything was fine, only to be blindsided (again.)
You hadn’t told someone (again) how much they meant to you, how good you thought they were at what they were doing (again) and it left them alone and then they left you (again.)
Not that this is about you.
Nate has no way of knowing just how many of your deepest buttons he just hit, getting shit off of his chest, but you can feel that telltale feeling that comes when your anxiety is rising without the rest of you. It’s that specific brand of foreboding, resignation, and – now after the Doc – realization that it’s time to use some tactics to mitigate what you can.
Back to Kansas, where you belong. With your son.
‘With your son.’ Tacked onto the first statement, and you don’t want to assign significance where it might not have even been intentional, but does that say something about you? That he only remembered to add that on after he initially thought he was done?
You’re just putting thoughts in Nate’s mouth at this point. You and the Doc have already talked about this, but it’s hard to think about not doing something when thinking about not doing it means you have to think about the thing you’re not doing.
Dinner is already underway in the meantime – just a quick thing with some chicken and couscous and broccoli, since apparently you’ve got to actually eat some of the green stuff you always leave behind on your plate at the Crown and Anchor. Couscous is easier than rice, which you’ve accidentally burned more than once by mistake when you get entrenched in your thoughts like this. The chicken is smothered in some of your precious BBQ sauce from home, which might not have been your best decision in the last several hours but it’s making you feel at least a bit better while it deepens your confliction, so at least there’s that.
You’re a fucking joke.
It’s by far from the first time you’ve been told that – hell, it’s been stated both directly and ambiently about you ever since you arrived in Richmond, much less in the decades of your life prior to that. It did indeed used to really bother you, and truthfully it doesn’t anymore. Really bother you, at least. It does bother you a little bit, it’s just easier to ignore now. You can mentally devil’s advocate other people into whatever hypothetical situation makes their vitriol understandable.
Beard absolutely hates this ability of yours.
You sure as hell don’t belong here.
And you don’t, right? You didn’t, at least. But do you?
Should you even want to belong here? When Henry isn’t?
What use is it being propelled forward by bettering these young men’s lives when you aren’t even there for the very young man you created?
But something about the very idea of going back to Kansas right now provokes an instantly negative gut-reaction.
(You were startled to realize a few months ago that it was “Kansas”, not “home”.)
It’s a little troubling, that reaction, but something within it makes it impossible to make the decision. Which, in turn, makes it obvious you aren’t done here yet, for whatever reason.
The dishes have been set on a towel to the left of the sink, and now you’re going through the motions of drying them, since even though your kitchen has a frankly inexplicable combination of ovens and ranges, it doesn’t have a dishwasher. Which is fine. You’re only ever cooking for two and a half, tops.
You finish your evening routine on autopilot, still processing but in that stage where you’re letting the hindbrain work on it more than anything else. Exhaustion lets you sink comfortably into the bed once you’re finally in it, and you curl up onto your side with a pillow between your knees and another in your arms.
What have I got to learn here?
What indeed.
———————————
x
———————————
‘So, where’re we headed?’
You’ve just buckled your seatbelt – it still feels bizarre to be buckling it in on the right like this without then immediately reaching out for the wheel and gearshift – then turn to watch her reach out for the wheel and gearshift and smoothly get the car on its way.
She meets this inquiry with a look that could at best be described as wryly dismissive, and at worst be witheringly amused. Or perhaps the other way around, depending on how one feels about it. Either way, you weren’t really expecting an actual answer, given how she’d been unwilling to provide any details beyond that the Santa hat would be fitting for the occasion.
‘Alright then, Welton, keep your secrets.’
Out of the corner of your eye, you can see her make an aborted glance in your direction - it’s a movement that you’re not unfamiliar with, something she does when she’s either not quite sure what that just meant or simply isn’t sure how to respond to it, considers getting clarification to potentially stall, and then apparently decides to just move on. You hide a smile looking out the window. She’s honestly sometimes a very silly person, even though it seems that even she’s not aware of it more often than not; he can’t really blame other people for not always being able to see it, even as obvious to him as it is.
For a few minutes, it’s a comfortable quiet within the car, just the sounds of the road, the ambience of pedestrians gradually fading as you leave Richmond, the slightly different white noise fading back in as you enter another neighborhood, the quiet tones of Christmas songs softly coming from the turned-down radio. You feel a little better than you did fifteen minutes ago, although the longer the drive lasts in silence, the more you can feel some of the same creeping back in around the edges. It makes you shift in the seat a little, run your thumbnail absently along the groove in the door where two parts of the plastic around the handle meet, and then again where the plastic meets the softer fabric just a half inch below that. Normally you’d be able to flex and roll your fingers against the steering wheel instead, and it still feels weird to be sitting on this side without that sense of autonomy within this automobile.
You in no way begrudge her for it, or honestly want it, but at the same time–
Although you don’t necessarily always have the best track record with that sort of thing when you’re going down this road.
‘Favourite Christmas cookie.’
‘Mm, whassat?’
The question pulls you out of where you’d been sinking into your thoughts again, but not quickly enough for you to actually catch what it was.
‘What’s your favourite Christmas cookie?’
Something warm starts to slowly crash over you, although you know better than to call any attention to her stepping out on a limb just now.
‘Well, I’m quite partial to a good snickerdoodle. Ooh, or puppy chow bars. Although I think my favorite is probably just a nice plain ol’ molasses cookie. They stay so soft and chewy. Or molasses bread - I mean I know that’s not a cookie, but you get some warm molasses bread with some cream cheese? Oh baby.’
There’s a pause.
‘Do I… want. To know, what constitutes “puppy chow”?’
‘Like muddy buddies, but for this you make ‘em into bars.’
This time the silence has a totally different feel to it.
‘Boss, c’mon. You serious? We gotta fix this.’
‘Yes, it sounds like a grave oversight in my overall upbringing.’
You recognize a conversational door closing when you see one, and opt instead to hop through the window to the left.
‘What’s your favorite Christmas cookie?’
She rolls her fingers against the wheel for a couple of moments.
‘My nan used to make these pistachio-rose shortbread cookies, only around the holidays. She made them as sugar cookies sometimes, but I always preferred the others.’
‘Woo boy, fancypants. That does sound good though, love a good nut.’
The both of you sit for a moment while the syllables of that sentence finish banging on your eardrums. It’s not even that – well. Maybe it is.
‘Do you, uh. Have another one?’
‘Date bon bons.’
‘Ooh, what’re those?’
‘Carmelised dates, Rice Krispies, pecans, and confectioners sugar.’
You tilt your head for a moment.
‘Wait, that sounds like a Fry Pan ball?’
‘A what?’
‘A Fry Pan ball. You tellin’ me we’ve potentially actually been snackin’ on some of the same Christmas treats?’
‘I… suppose?’
‘Maybe we’ll both have to make ‘em and then swap and see the similarities. Sounds like fun to me.’
Rebecca mumbles something under her breath as the pair of you turn into one of those itty-bitty parking lots that are really more of a strip of land where people seem to have collectively decided it was okay to leave their cars.
Well that just won’t do.
‘What was that?’ you ask, probably a smidge too gleefully.
There’s that witheringly wry amused dismissal you so enjoy seeing.
‘Sounds grand, Ted. Can’t wait.’
—
She seems a little bit anxious as you both walk back to the car, twisting a ring on her finger and thickening the vibes in the air in a manner that you’re familiar with. You decide to deftly cut through it with all the finesse that those around you are also familiar with.
But she beats you to it, just after you’ve both settled back into the car and are moving towards the next location.
‘That’s the second time I’ve put you on the spot when you didn’t deserve to be, I’m sorry.’
It’s completely out of left-field, honestly, and it’s such a left-field-loop that you need a moment to recalibrate.
‘Hey now, that’s–’ Actually. ‘Where’s that coming from?’
She seems somewhat disinclined to elaborate. It doesn’t not track, but at the same time, it does feel like a bit of a step backwards, even as this entire outing feels like a slight step forwards as well.
You decide to move the spotlight elsewhere.
‘You ever heard of the 4H club?’ There’s a predictable pause. ‘I’m gonna take your stereotypical British lack of response as a general “no”.’
You readjust in the seat just a little bit, settling into the leather since you were just up and out of it, settling into it since you want a little bit of grounding, settling into it since you’re a little chilly and you’re seeking out the body warmth your butt should have just left in it since you were only out for a few minutes.
‘By the way, is it bad if I call you British? ‘Cause I’m gonna be honest, I’ve seen people get real mad about being called one or the other and I’m not really sure what the distinction is just yet.’
But that’s just jetsam while you work out where you’re going.
‘Anyway. 4H does all this extra community and educational stuff. We did this one meeting where we were supposed to taste things and then try and figure out what they were.’
She’s following, in the decades-long awareness you’ve built up sort of way where you know she’s still listening but has absolutely no sense of where this is actually headed. You have a sort of lukewarm sense of familiarity in regards to it, but continue on regardless.
‘So you’re blindfolded and then you’re supposed to take a bite of something, and you’re supposed to figure out if it’s, you know, a potato, or an apple, or an onion, or something.’ You both come to a stop at a light.
‘They made you bite into an onion?’
You laugh. ‘Well, no. I mean, yeah, but not a full onion, just a piece of one.’
‘What sort of onion?’
‘I was nine and I was blindfolded, Rebecca, I have no idea what kinda onion it was.’
‘I’m just saying – there are some that might be more identifiable or–’
‘That wasn’t really the point of the whole thing, if you’d let me finish? Also it’s green.’
The car jerks forward a little with her quiet, ‘Oh, fuck.’
Honestly you think you do a decent job not smiling at her distraction, only a second or two as it was. But it does give you a few seconds to get back on track, after the semi-hearted derailment of your train of thought.
‘Anyhow – when you can’t really focus specifically on anything, apples and potatoes might suddenly be similar in taste, if confusing in texture, or onions might be sweet all of a sudden, or maybe you can’t identify any of ‘em at all. Maybe all of a sudden you don’t like something you thought you did when you don’t have the rest of it right there.’
You’re suddenly a little lost in thought, drifting out of what you meant to be saying to her and helping pull her out of her thoughts and instead getting vaguely lost amongst the flotsam you’ve managed to amass around yourself during this tide of a conversation.
But you’ve a lifetime of recovery for this sort of thing.
She glides through a couple of blocks and turns while you both percolate.
‘Sometimes you bite into an onion and it’s an apple, and sometimes the other way around. And sometimes it’s just a potato. It’s hard to tell when you don’t have all the facts.’
It’s quiet again for a little while, before she quietly asks,
‘And what are the facts, Ted?’
You have a vague idea of where you were headed, but honestly lost it in the process a little bit. And maybe you’re also just a little bit of a coward and don’t want to say what’s really on your mind. And maybe you’re also just a little bit more broken than normal right now and don’t really actually know if all of that was about her or about you or about some paired-but-separate combination of the two. You’d like to say maybe there’s some whiskey to blame but honestly you don’t think you could plausibly get away with that, since anything you had in your system probably matriculated out somewhere between now and telling a little girl she could smell Beijing from London.
So you hide, like usual.
‘Boss, I absolutely hate raw onions.’
———————————
x
———————————
You sniffle a couple more times before the pair of you separate, you taking a step back to self-consciously wipe at your face and smooth your moustache in a self-soothing motion you never even notice yourself doing anymore. She steps back as well, levelling you with that eerily calm expression she nearly always seems to have.
(Except for when she has a concussion, apparently. You sort of envy her ability to have that much self-composure and control – you had to figure out a very different sort of armor to deal with the noisiness of the world.)
There’s a sort of pause in the air while you continue to collect yourself and she very politely refrains from asking if you’re going to be okay. This is the least put-together you’ve found yourself in front of anyone for a while now and you’re trying your hardest to let the overwhelming sense of vulnerability be abated by the concurrent sense of relief that’s blooming like moss along the edges of your person.
You chuckle a little, a wet, soft sound, running a hand once again over your face, forehead to chin, then letting it push your hair back where you can feel it tickling your forehead.
‘Thanks, uh, again. For coming by. The house call. And the hug.’
‘Of course, Ted. Thank you for calling when you needed help.’
Like many other things she’s said in your favor this afternoon, this doesn’t do much to ease your comfort, so you somewhat jerkily nod an acknowledgement since you know deflecting or demurring will be met with direct but gentle correction on her end. It’s easier to simply try and let the words sink in.
She’ll likely have to repeat the same sentiment several more times to carve it into your skin, how callused it’s become through the years, but you’re starting to have faith – belief, even – that you’ll get there at some point.
‘Not to make like a gelato chef and make you a banana split, but I probably ought to get back to getting ready.’
You’re well acquainted with the minute facial shifts in her expressions now enough to know that with this response, she’s fairly certain you’re shaken still but steady enough to leave to your own self-coping devices, and also that she’s heavily judging you for implying that banana splits are made with gelato. It’s not your fault there’s not really a name for people who serve ice cream.
‘Can I carry your weird bike downstairs for ya?’
‘I left it in the entry landing, but thank you.’
Nodding again, you brush your hands down the front of your shirt before shoving them into your pockets, still a bit off-balance, and the relief that comes when she smiles that small smile and begins to take her own leave is one that you only feel a little bit guilty for feeling.
The rest of her farewell is characteristically quick and to the point, and when you close the door behind her you exhale. There’s the normal feeling of having been hollowed out that you typically feel from any panic attack, compounded with the sharper carving out that comes from a rough session. There’s the lingering fumes of anxiety surrounding attending the funeral that weren’t consumed in the attack, and the comfort of having been able to confide in and be reassured by a friend, even a professional one. Checking your watch, it’s obvious there’s absolutely no chance you’ll be able to be in any way on time, although that may or may not be a blessing – giving you the opportunity to skip over part of what you dreaded the most about attending your own father’s. The small-talk before a funeral is always nothing but condolences, but the small-talk afterwards is frequently more of a celebration of the individual who has passed, and that’s the part you’d prefer to dwell on.
And you realize, as you’re tucking in your shirt and taking a second attempt on the tie, what a gift the Doc has just given you. Remembering the nice things, rather than what has overshadowed them for so long. Something that you might, in fact, be able to use to help Rebecca through this time as well, which will probably help you feel better than anything else today. Giving you the tools to help yourself makes you a better caregiver to others in turn, and while that brings up some confusing feelings with your mom, those are easily brushed aside in the moment while you focus on making sure you have your jacket and keys and oyster card and have texted Beard so he knows you’re on the way and not to worry.
One hand on the doorknob, you close your eyes, remember that still-anxious but incredibly-loved feeling you felt sitting down to take that book test all those years ago, blow out a breath, and walk out into the world.